The Sight and Sound of the Greek Genocide Around the Kültürpark in Izmir

Tolga Theo Yalur

Kültürpark in the modern Izmir is the site that was built on part of the neighborhoods that went on fire in Smyrna in the final stage of ethnic cleansing that decimated the ancient Anatolian Greek communities in 1913-1922. The object of my research, Kültürpark, is not far from my academic interests and published research on cognitive philosophy, specialized with the psychoanalysis in cultural practices, visual studies and irreligion. Though the word “genocide” has been treated as an interdisciplinary reflection in the humanities and cultural sciences, the psychoanalytic contribution to the symptoms of the Real in genocides would be unavoidable in my research. The Greek Genocide has been shrouded in silence and denial in the hegemonic, official and media narratives in Turkey and Greece, with the traumatic experiences of the Greek dismissed or minimized, or transferred to other questions or the others’ questions at best. As is well known, psychoanalytic method goes beyond the sphere of material praxis in medicine and into all that concerns the unconscious of the double-coincidence of the Real, the one that denies part of reality and the other that is the mad component of all belief and ideology, has led to the elucidation of the functions and avatars of these constructions both on the subjective and trans-subjective plans. Kültürpark in Izmir was built on part of the neighborhoods that went on fire in Smyrna in the final stage of ethnic cleansing that decimated the ancient Anatolian Greek communities, where hundreds of thousands lost their lives, and mostly the Turkish migrants from Greece and Balkans repopulated the city. Formally acknowledging the Greek Genocide, would preserve the memory of the victims, ensuring the stories are told, and paving the way for a more comprehensive history that does not whitewash or distort the truth.

The Freudian Wit of the Kültürpark

When representation is seen "as translation work rather than mere reportage," says the communication scholar Barbie Zelizer in Visual Culture and the Holocaust (2000), it would work metaphorically incomprehensive rather than a complete index. This is "the frailty of representational codes into our own expectations" of what each of these code should do. In other words, Zelizer is underlining the fact that representational codes of any economy of culture and wisdom would tend to assimilate the represented into its own nomoi (νόμος), and that the debate needs to go beyond these "preferred" plans that privilege "the factual over the the represented, and silence the alarm bells that tend to ring when representation tugs at reality." These warning signs divide the visual representation into maintaining the visual's underprivilege compared to the verbal or into elevating the visual forms beyond representations. While revealing the question of the indestructibility of the unconscious desire to mark its essential character in representation, reiteration and reproduction that cause the unrest in civilization, Freud was not walking down a spiritualist path but questioning the structure of discursive determining the economies of these representational codes, the cultures of reality and the symptoms of these disturbances. In psychoanalytic theory, discourses structure reality, functioning where the specular report to the media and culture is pressing.

This psychoanalytic notion of discourse would help rationalize the symptom on the web of reality around Kültürpark in the modern Izmir, the site of the final stage of the Greek Genocide that was built on part of the neighborhoods that went on fire in Smyrna in the final stage of ethnic cleansing that decimated the ancient Anatolian Greek communities in 1913-1922. The object of my research, Kültürpark, is not far from my academic interests and published research on cognitive philosophy, specialized with the psychoanalysis in cultural practices, visual studies and irreligion. Though the word “genocide” has been treated as an interdisciplinary reflection in the humanities and cultural sciences, the psychoanalytic contribution to the symptoms of the Real in genocides would be unavoidable in my research. The Greek Genocide has been shrouded in silence and denial in the hegemonic, official and media narratives in Turkey and Greece, with the traumatic experiences of the Greek dismissed or minimized, or transferred to other questions or the others’ questions at best. As is well known, psychoanalytic method goes beyond the sphere of material praxis in medicine and into all that concerns the unconscious of the double-coincidence of the Real, the one that denies part of reality and the other that is the mad component of all belief and ideology, has led to the elucidation of the functions and avatars of these constructions both on the subjective and trans-subjective plans. Hundreds of thousands lost their lives or went missing, and mostly the Turkish migrants from Greece and Balkans repopulated the city. Formally acknowledging the Greek Genocide, would not merely be a symbolic act, in preserving the memory of the victims, ensuring their stories are told, and paving the way for a more comprehensive history that does not whitewash or distort the truth.

The Greek Genocide involved a multi-pronged strategy of mass deportations, forced labor, systematic massacres, and other brutal acts targeting Greek civilians on a massive scale in the Ottoman, ending with the early republican Greek-Turkish War in the early Republic of Turkey. The Greek state waited until the 1990s to recognize the Greek Genocide, which remains in question internationally. The final stage of a decade of systematic campaigns of ethnic cleansing that decimated the ancient Anatolian Greek communities took place in Izmir, also known as the Smyrna Fire: an event that unfolded in 1922 during the wars. Trapping terrified civilians, the fires raged for days, spreading to the neighborhoods in the city center, followed by the fires in other neighboring districts. Mostly Greeks and Armenians lost their lives or went missing.

The unconscious psycho-cultural approaches contribute to the construction of fictions and beliefs within human groups. In psychoanalytic concepts of psychic truth, construction and belief, these problematize the comprehension of the real. The word “post-truth”, for instance, is incompatible with both democratic debate and anticipation, reaction and adaptation to a physically changing reality. Psychoanalytic conceptions of delusional constructions, illusions, the explanation of religious beliefs and constructions in reality analyses lead to understanding the discursive regimes relating to the concealed and veiled as the Real, the collective productions of the unconscious capable of shaping cores of psychic truth which are not publicized. These “reality fictions” solicit the unconscious dynamics for those who adhere to them would represent a distorted and displaced way of expressing what does not find a representation in shared fictions. Politics necessitates interpreting differently and wanting to change common prior descriptions and prescribed fictions of the world. No change is the reproduction of the illusion and status-quo, when reality is what the extreme right-wing discourse always wants to describe in the collective unconscious.

(How) does the information on the web of reality (local, global, international) inform the conscious and unconscious symptoms around the park? Is the available information enough to have an answer about the reality of the site? Are the logics in what I describe as the informative discourse predetermined before it informs about the Real? The informative discourse of the sight and sound; visuals, texts and sound is one of the areas to see the formulation of the fictions of the Greek Genocide, predominantly constructed through pre-learned and pre-coded affects, genres and stereotypes. The sight and the sound, the heareable and the visible concern the affect of the symptoms reveal themselves in the informative fictions from Greece, Turkish and international communities. When Freud questioned the affect in his description of the unheimlich, the unusual, the feeling of otherness that differs from the most common, the most ordinary, the most familiar sights and sounds – excursive and not repressed at all, closely connected to the verbal symbolism (J. Lacan “Du Discours Psychanalytique” 1972). The question for informative discourses would be if there are any ideologies and economy-politics involved in these constructs of the truths of the genocide. Affect plays a crucial role in these constructs, especially in fiction and music, such as the era films about the Greek and Turkish communities in Izmir, shared realities through music. The affect of the sight and sound would be verbalized in the symbolism that represents, for example, labels and moods chosen in constructing realities around the genocide in general and the Smyrnan Fire in particular. The web of reality concerns the context of Turkey and how discourses situates the Greek Genocide internationally. Even the Greek state could censure a film on the fire of Smyrna in the 1970s. What I describe as "the informative discourse" has the symbolizing mechanism to register, diagnose, detect, decode the patterns or patternize how the Smyrna Fire was informed and represented in visual, textual, official and media. The information is both conditioning and conditioned by the hegemonically prescribed information.

The Real condition is a symptom, questioning the forms of post-truth fiasco in the work of culture and the crises of shared structures of meaning, underlining the necessity to conceive human constructs and mindsets critically. A founding myth of the occidental episteme, psychoanalysis posed the spiny question of how living in the illusion of beliefs linked to the human condition would be free by knowing what silences, expanding and extending this reflection with the tools from psychoanalytic experience, with regards to the construction of belief and alternative truths that unfold in the psychic life of the individuals and groups. In the USA of the 1960s, more of a multitude of news channels and social networks could, say, spread the news of "the Entry of Soviet cats into Cuba". How would that have been perceived? Of course, there were no Soviet cats entering Cuba for real. What is necessary for a democracy is common-sense, a shared world dealing with what is sacred in a number of statistical data. Similarly, in Turkey of the 1950s, mainstream news media could spread the fake-news "The birth-house of Ataturk in Salonika in Greece is bombed." And in a matter of days, the poor leftovers of the Turkish-Greeks who had been dispossessed via the Wealth Tax and the like, following the genocides, would be forced to leave the land they were living for millennia after their houses and shops were demolished and looted in the pogrom.

Doubt is in the method to reformulate or formulate a new truth or another truth. That is to say, adjusting the truth. In these informative fictions, there is a democratic incompatibility. There are numerous other possible ineffability that are no less important, all of which have the same sources. The exposure of inequalities in the Ottoman and Turkey obviously concerns very different statuses that render it extremely difficult for the public interest in the Greek Genocide. What does it mean to be “Turkish”? Were the Turks the last ethnic group of the Ottoman to build a nation-state? Are there any Greekness or other ethnic traits hidden and assimilated in the construction of the national identity of Turkishness? That’s where Freudian critical mind, his wit would make the doubt work. He pointed out the inextricable connection of illusion to belief. Psychoanalysis is the Freudian genius, denouncing that the need for belief and religion is a powerful means of mobilizing the unconscious, provoking and manipulating the subject. As such, the Ottoman conceived muslim Greeks as Turks, which was a reason why a lot of non-muslims converted especially during the war to count as “Turk,” and avoid death. The need for belief is the human difficulty in renouncing the idealized and confirming to disillusioning the world. The concept is closely linked to the ideas of secularization and modernity.

Driven from their ancestral homelands, millions of Greeks were forced to flee westward, enduring harrowing journeys of displacement and death marches that claimed countless lives, hundreds of thousands. Those who remained behind were subjected to horrific atrocities – mass killings, forced labor, sexual violence, and the destruction of Greek cultural and religious sites. Convert Greeks remained on the mainland Anatolia as a part of the Turkish identity construction in Turkey, and quite a number of greco-turks ended up in Turkey via exchange programs. None of these are recognized in the official language of the Turkish state, assimilated into a unitary and fantasmagorical idea of “Turk”, the mythical visage of Ataturk, “the father of Turks”, who was from a predominantly Turco-Balkan, and watched the major Greek city of Izmir burning at the end of the Greek-Turkish War.

For there to be a real published debate, factuality like no otherwise, there should not be fiction. The official recognition of the Greek Genocide would have been a pivotal milestone in the long and arduous journey. The Greek Genocide has been shrouded in silence and denial in the hegemonic, official and media narratives, with the traumatic experiences of the Greek dismissed or minimized, or transferred to other questions at best. Formally acknowledging the Greek Genocide would lay the groundwork for reparations, restitution, and educational initiatives that can help heal the deep wounds inflicted by this genocide, empowering the descendants to reclaim their heritage at the site of the Kültürpark with a museum dedicated to the Greek Genocide in general and its final stage of the Smyrna fire in particular.

Tolga Theo Yalur, PhD

Cognitive Philosopher. Born in Izmir, Turkey, Tolga Theo Yalur studied Economics at METU (Ankara) and Cultural Studies at GMU (Fairfax, VA), and taught media and culture courses in Turkey and the USA, at GMU, Bosphorus University (Istanbul), and the New School (NYC). He publishes openly at the Psychoanalyσto Library on the advances of and the troubles with cognitive sciences, ideologies and religions.